Music as a Site of Intensity and Articulation: Sounding Cities and the (Necro)Politics of Asylum

This chapter introduces the idea of music as a site of intensity and articulation as a driving analytical sensibility derived from the ethnographic engagement with the weekly music space and the “heterogeneous collectives” of sounds, subjectivities, things, and places that made it happen. The chapter discusses this analytical sensibility by putting to dialogue scholarly analyses on the politics of sound, space/place, and affects with an interdisciplinary body of research that links music, leisure, forced migration, belonging, and the (necro)politics of asylum. The chapter outlines some of the productive tensions and affordances that the theoretical frameworks put to dialogue in the book can offer to advance analyses that exceed binary readings on the nexus between music, leisure, and (forced) migration and wider issues of asylum, displacement, and sanctuary.